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Category: soundtrack

Here are a couple pieces that I made in 2003. They’re among my first attempts with this stuff and with Reason. Most of the sounds you hear are my voice in ReDrum. The other sounds, like the bells, are from the NN-XT sampler.

The second piece was used a soundtrack in an animation I made in early 2004.

The video is from last August, 2008. The main melody was one of my many hundreds of little unfinished 4-bar pieces of things that I have tucked in my Ableton folder. When I shot this video, I knew I needed something perky. I randomly opened a few Ableton projects and came across this one called at the time “Beep Repeat.” Yes, I name things so that months later I have zero idea what they are.
It got elaborated upon and after messing with the timing, it fit pretty much perfectly. A friend said it sounds like busy.

A soundtrack for a snowfall, in honor of the storm that came through here yesterday. The electric piano is Ableton’s “Electric” synth, and the whirly odd reverby noises in the second half are from that loop being dragged through my Korg Kaoss Pad.

I first discovered Reason back in 2003 and spent a good deal of time playing with the demo of version 2.5. I was working on an animated promo for a book I had written and illustrated that was to be shown at a French book festival in Paris. With the idea of “driving” in mind, I meant to make something that would feel like it was in motion. This song, Drive, was the result. Eventually, it got replaced as the soundtrack to that animation, and I spent a little time making different versions of it over the years.
In 2005 I made one with a more synthy beepy feel. I used Reason for this as well, this time with Matrix running Malström for the bell in the background, and Subtractor as the main synthesizer. This was used by my friend Barbara as a soundtrack to a movie she made for a graduate thesis project. It worked well for that.
Two years later, I had made a little movie following my son around a playground on our bikes and I needed a soundtrack. So once again, I repurposed “Drive.” This time, I exported the MIDI from Reason and brought it into Ableton Live, using Operator as the main synthesizer. I added drums and made it much more complicated.

Here are the three versions of “Drive,” followed by the movie that used the third version as a soundtrack.

This was originally created to be a soundtrack for an animation about robots. Yes, robots. Go figure.
Instead it found life accompanying a movie I made in 1997, riding my bike from my apartment in San Francisco to Ocean Beach. Here’s that.